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He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “We can get someone in.”

She threw her hands up. “Don’t bother. I’m not the woman you need doing this.”

She wrenched open the storeroom door just as he called out, “I never thought I’d see the day that Lavinia Malcolm ran away from a challenge.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m not Lavinia Malcolm anymore. You’d do well to remember that.”

The meeting had been exactly what Andrew had expected. An utter disaster.

He’d warned Sir Newton and all the rest of them at Home that he was the last man Lavinia Malcolm—Parkem—would trust. Never mind that she was a civilian—there were no militaristic rules governing her participation. The truth was that the War Office needed her willing participation, or it would get no participation at all.

He swiped at the hair that had fallen out of place as he walked away from the little shop on Victoria Street. He might as well head to the address Sir Newton’s dossier had given him for his fabricated business and tell this Gibson fellow that his services as a liaison wouldn’t be needed. Without Lavinia there would be no operation.

The few minutes it took to walk from Lavinia’s shop to Blair Street didn’t do anything to improve his mood. If anything, they darkened it. What else could he expect now that he had nothing but uninterrupted time to ponder his encounter with the woman he’d once expected would become his wife?

Her face had lost some of the softness it had possessed when she’d been newly twenty—the last time he’d seen her. There was a leanness about her now, as though the world had chiseled away the innocence of youth and left her face sharper, more angular. The rich brown hair he’d loved to feel slip between his fingers was shot through with strands of gray at her temples that gave her an elegant quality, and the fine lines around her eyes belied many hours spent stitching by gaslight.

He raised a hand, touching a finger to the web at the corner of his own eyes, the result of months at a time spent squinting out over the bow of a ship at the sun-reflecting water. They’d both aged, but where he felt like a man old before his time, she had the carriage of a queen. Eleanor of Aquitaine couldn’t have looked down her nose at him with such disdain, judging him to be nothing more than a peasant polluting her kingdom with his mere presence.

Yes, her haughtiness stirred something inside him. When he’d left her, she’d been a sweet, mischievous girl. Now she was undeniably a woman. Worldly and confident, she was exactly what he hadn’t expected, yet the thought of this new Lavinia intrigued him. And the worst part was, it made him want her even more powerfully than he had when he’d seen her through the shopwindow, scissors raised menacingly in conversation with Wark.

He shook his head as he turned onto Blair Street and stopped in front of No. 14. It was a small shop with a plate-glass window that stretched almost its entire width. Inside, he could see cabinets fitted with tiny drawers, no doubt holding all of the buttons that he was supposed to be selling. He wondered how long ago Home had purchased this storefront and whether it had served as the cover for any other operations.

The door was locked, but there was a key for a doorbell next to a brass plaque that read, Colter’s Fine Notions. He turned the key, feeling a little ridiculous that he had to ask permission to enter his own “shop.” The bell rang through the three-story building, and after a moment, the tumblers clicked and the door was flung open. Standing on the threshold looking up at him through narrow eyes was a slip of a girl hardly more than eighteen wearing a bold tartan dress with a tight lace collar that looked like it was trying to strangle her.

“Can I help you, sir?” she asked politely.

“I’m looking for a Mr. Gibson,” he said, forcing himself to blink or risk being blinded by the appalling clash of blue, yellow, green, and red that was her dress.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

When she continued to stare at him, he cleared his throat, and said, “Up in the morning’s no for me, up in the morning early.”

“When a’ the hills are cover’d wi’ snaw, I’m sure it’s winter fairly,” she replied, finishing the verse and then stepping back to let him pass. “Do come in.”

“Isn’t Robert Burns a little on the nose?” he asked.

“I can assure you, the code was Home’s choice and not my own. I can’t stand the man,” she said, lifting her skirts an inch. “This way.”

“Isn’t Burns a national treasure?” he asked.

She shot him a sour look over her shoulder. “Just because he wrote a lot of barely comprehensible rubbish doesn’t mean that all Scotsmen and -women wish for it to be shoved down their throats at every turn.”

“Perhaps you should suggest Walter Scott then,” he said.

“Stevenson, Lang, Montgomery, and all he wants is Scott. No imagination,” she muttered with a huff.

His poetry critic guide pushed through a door off the landing to the private rooms of the shop. There was a reception area that was set up to resemble a sitting room, and beyond it an office. When the young woman let him in, he expected Mr. Gibson to be seated behind the plain oak desk. Instead, she rounded it and dropped unceremoniously into the chair before crossing her hands on the table and fixing him with a look.

“Gillie Gibson, at your service,” she said.

“You’re Gibson?” he asked, taken aback.

She wiggled her fingers in the air. “Surprise.”

“You’re a woman,” he said.